


keep burning.

by perennials



Category: Given (Manga)
Genre: Character Study, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, Pre-Canon, because yuuki, mealworms as a metaphor for the impermanence of human life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-18
Updated: 2019-08-18
Packaged: 2020-09-06 12:56:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,208
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20291827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perennials/pseuds/perennials
Summary: Mafuyu without Yuuki is like a parachute without the parachute.





	keep burning.

**Author's Note:**

> cw: mild implied homophobia, meal worms, i think i may have described depression

Mafuyu does not hold onto Yuuki’s guitar for sentimental reasons. He isn’t thinking about the significance of his dead boyfriend’s music, or his hands on the fretboard, or the fight they had in the dead of winter when they were fourteen and Mafuyu did not want oden, but popsicles. He isn’t thinking at all. Yuuki’s mother gives him her dead son’s dead guitar with the kind of masquerade ball performance that would put Shakespeare on edge. She gives him everything, except for her resentment and her sadness and whatever lingering disapproval may have remained from the day her son fell in love with another boy and then doomed himself to a brief, luminous life of misery. Mafuyu tries to find it in himself to be grateful, but really he’s just disappointed. Still, he takes it from her with both hands and a polite bow, says something he once read in a book in middle school about how he’s glad he had been Yuuki’s friend and he is sure Yuuki is smiling down at them from heaven. His mother is not here with him today, because unlike Yuuki’s mother, she had quietly disapproved of their relationship from the start. Now her son is the one who is left she will never be able to face the childless woman standing before Mafuyu, thumbing plaintively at the tassels of her shawl, again.

He doesn’t give the guitar away. That feels like an act of blasphemy, somehow, so he doesn’t do that, and instead holds onto it with a selfish, self-destructive determination that follows him all the way home.

  


;

  


Summer comes around again, and he spends too long standing in the middle of the park while Tama strains at his leash and whines about something. He gets bitten by a mosquito for his efforts in maintaining some semblance of a Saturday morning routine, and for the rest of the day he does unusual things like crossing and uncrossing his fingers and touching his ear and making a star with a rubber band on his wrist. It keeps him preoccupied until the next morning, when in the bathroom mirror he observes with regret that the ominous pink dot on his forearm has swelled to the size of a fist. Washing it with cold water provides temporary relief, but his hands wander back to the wound whenever he stops thinking. It is hot and itchy and terribly uncomfortable. Not for the first time, he wonders why the human soul went to all the trouble of finding a body to haunt. It would be much more convenient for them to all float, detached and legless, around on the scarred surface of the planet like dead insects in a swimming pool. Maybe then, global warming could have been avoided.

This would be a convenient time for him to segue into a bitter monologue about how bodies are fragile things which break too easily. He wonders if he should as he peels the plastic cover off of his convenience store bento, and decides against it. Tama runs circles around his feet while he puts rice and fried egg and bits of marinated chicken into his mouth with mechanical imprecision. He feeds the leftovers to him. He sorts the trash. Today, as well, the unpleasant thing sits in the far corner of his living room, and watches him.

  


;

  


In elementary school, they had a science teacher who was wildly passionate about insects, so much so that she received permission from the higher-ups to bring in live specimens to study. She chose meal worms, because they were small and harmless and relatively easy to take care of, even for a group of ten year-olds whose only talents were yelling at the top of their lungs and crying on command. While the other classes were watering green bean shoots in plastic cups, each student in her class was assigned a meal worm. It was kept in a small plastic container with a lid that had several holes punched into it. Inside the container was a shallow bed of oats, which she informed them the meal worms would use for nourishment in their quest to become strong and sturdy beetles, the point being that meal worms, despite being worms, undergo metamorphosis. She wanted to show them how the world was brimming with the capacity for change, even within gross-looking brown worms that spent half their lives bulldozing through garbage.

What really happened was that Nishiyama burst into tears at Toi’s command, knocking over an expensive looking pencil case which belonged to Kawasaki, who sat at the back of class and flicked crumpled paper balls at boys she didn’t like. Kawasaki was freshly offended by Nishiyama’s existence and crumpled an entire sheet of paper so she could hurl it at his head, but was stopped by Mei, who had been in love with Nishiyama since the start of term two. Up until now the rest of the class had merely spectated with detached curiosity, but it seemed more fun to involve themselves in the chaos than to stand by the side and stare at a bunch of dead-looking worms. So everyone started crumpling papers which were also science worksheets and throwing them at each other. More pencil cases fell off tables. When the class ended Yuuki tried to sneak his meal worm container home and failed. Mafuyu bit back laughter while Yuuki toed at the floor with his shoes and was gently reprimanded for his actions. This is a life, Yoshida-kun, said their teacher. You have to be careful with it. Once it is gone, it cannot be taken back. Not like a pencil case on the floor. He either had not heard her words or chose not to respond to them. Like this he and Mafuyu tottered out of the school grounds with their tiny hands linked together, and headed back into their half-full realities.

Mafuyu named his meal worm Naruto, because he liked Naruto and he thought he wanted to like his meal worm too. On Thursday he went to class early, as he had been doing all week, eager to see if Naruto had become a strong and sturdy beetle yet, upon which he would be able to walk out into the rooftop garden like a hero and set him free. But Naruto had died.

  


;

  


Another time in middle school he stumbled upon a short story, posted by a faceless writer who went by the name ‘prepubescent angst’ online, about a boy and a boy who fell in love without any girls between them, shoehorned into the equation so that their parents would not stare at them funny. Looking at Yuuki dozing on the train beside him, expression loose and hazy and and his chin tucked into the top layer of his blue scarf, Mafuyu wondered if this story could be theirs.

But that daydream belongs to another world. Further away from here, where all of them are secretly immortal. And people do not say things that they do not mean out of anger, and frustration, and misguided, but genuine, love.

  


;

  


Conversation Satou Mafuyu Has With The Angel And Devil On His Shoulders: an exercise in literary techniques one should employ during Japanese essay exams, as recommended by his teacher.

Legend:

A = Angel

D = Devil

M = Mafuyu

A: He should stop carrying that guitar everywhere he goes. Look at that boy! His back is going to break. He’s going to get scoliosis.

D: He’s miserable, you dipshit. Let him carry what he wants to carry.

A: The guitar is a metaphor for the guilt he still feels towards Yuuki’s death even though it’s been a year since the funeral and at the rate he is going he is never going to let go of any of these negative emotions. It will haunt him to his first job interview. Do you really want that for him? I don’t want that for him.

D: But does he even want to get over Yuuki’s death? Think about it. Yuuki was everything to him. Their feet were practically tied together. Mafuyu without Yuuki is like a parachute without the parachute.

A: Are you saying he should just crash?

D: No. I’m saying he should do whatever he needs to do.

M: I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. Can I keep the guitar?

  


;

  


Everyone wants the ten-years-later gotten-over-it-all smiling-with-sad-knowing-eyes time skip to the part where he isn’t hung up over his dead boyfriend’s guitar anymore, but the truth is Mafuyu leaves part of himself at that funeral and never quite gets it back. He could tell you that he gets better, if that’s what you want to hear. He’s no good at being honest with his feelings but he can act as terribly as you need him to. Yet it would be tiring, pretending he’s the protagonist of some tragedy who mopes for three months and then wakes up one morning and decides, abruptly, he’s ready to be a human being again. Being a human being is tiring.

He’s standing in the dairy section of the supermarket with a shopping basket on his arm one day, when he realizes he can’t remember what brand of milk he usually buys. He calls his mother, but it goes to voicemail. She’s still at work. In the end he picks the brand that’s on discount, gets a treat for Tama, and then heads home. The sky is vivid and hurts his eyes to look at outside, so he keeps his head down and stares at his feet. Around him, children stop to play in puddles of orange light, their parents drifting in and out of the sun’s trajectory in a halfhearted attempt to preserve what is left of their youth. The future stretches out long and gray ahead of him, like when you’re in the last carriage of the train and, staring out of the window at the far end, all you can see is endless, moving darkness.

  


;

  


Let it be known that Mafuyu is not stupid. He understands, as much as he knows that osmosis is the uptake of water and diffusion only happens along a concentration gradient, that he does not own Yuuki’s death. It is no one’s but his to mourn, and he is gone, these days, so really no one has the right to climb up onto the stage in a wrinkly plastic tree costume, and declare that they are riddled with guilt towards a dead boy. Dead boys do not leave footprints in the sand. They wander off to wherever dead boys go and then stay there, out of reach of the living and all their emotional baggage, their ziplock bags full of unspent feelings.

He could tell you that things get better, but in truth life does him no favors except to trudge slowly on with its usual shade of casual indifference. A quick trip to the fridge allows him to update his grocery list. His mother comes home earlier on some days and they sit at the dining table for an hour, while she attempts to bridge an emotional chasm which he has spent months and months digging with a spoon. He transfers to a different school at the start of his second year, still holding on to dead Yuuki’s dead guitar like it’ll do him any good, now.

He isn’t sad, but his limbs feel absurdly light, as if he is constantly moving through the bottom of a swimming pool, pushing at invisible currents with slow, stupid hands, while sunlight trickles down with a time-lag and hurts him. A year goes by and he still cannot give a word to the feeling in the left atrium of his heart, where the blood does not flow properly and congeals beneath taut muscle. But he isn’t sad.

  


;

  


Conversation Mafuyu Has With Uenoyama Ritsuka, One Year And Many, Many Days After His Dead Boyfriend Dies: an exercise in not using any of the literary techniques your teacher told you to use in middle school. You fail your essay test and it makes your mother sad. Luckily, you bought pudding at the convenience store on the way home, and offer it to her as an apology.

Legend:

M = Mafuyu

U = Uenoyama

M: Can you fix it? This guitar is a metaphor for the guilt I still feel towards my dead boyfriend’s death but also my fear of connecting to people now that I know how devastating it is to lose someone that matters to you. I am unable to tell you any of this right now exactly because of that fear of commitment and investment but you have beautiful eyes and a kind face and I can see behind your anger that you are really looking at me. I am not used to being looked at properly anymore, not since my boyfriend died following an argument in which I was unbelievably cruel and he, in turn, cruelly hurt. It is jarring, like being dropped into a swimming pool without any warning. I am not a sentimental person, but I used to be. Are you seeing what I’m seeing? This guitar has eyes on it, I swear.

U: (He has no idea what is happening but he likes guitars.) Sure, I guess.

**Author's Note:**

> talk to me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/nikiforcvs) or [tumblr](http://corpsentry.tumblr.com/)
> 
> i had a pet mealworm in first grade. he was cool. gusari's covered every character arc so well that i don't feel like my presence or blue ass writing is necessary within the canon timeline so i decided i'd write about mafuyu in the time following yuuki's death. if there's one thing i dislike about storytelling as a whole, it is how glossy things tend to be. the gift of recovery comes packaged in pretty paper and is immediate, tangible. but mafuyu is more complicated than that. i tried to portray this ambivalence (buzzword!), i suppose. instead of a clean y=x graph that goes straight up towards the heavens, i wanted to draw a huge dick in the sky and then call that the human condition. pretentiousness at its finest, yes?  
this was incredibly self indulgent (my marker for self indulgence is how long the paragraphs get, and some of these got Long) but i had a lot of fun, so if you've made it here then i hope you enjoyed this! thank you very much for reading and sharing some of your time with my words
> 
> have a good one


End file.
